As the amount of information available to users continues to dramatically increase, portals have become increasingly popular for aggregating and displaying information to users. Portals are an entry point or gateway that provide access to other web sites and information resources, as well as provide a single point of access to a wide variety of content, data, knowledge, and services. As such, portals have become increasingly popular with users as a starting point (often designated as their “home page”, e.g., the first page displayed when a given users starts his or her browser) for their use of a network. Publicly accessible Internet portals include Yahoo! Corporation's My-Yahoo!™, Microsoft Corporation's MSN™, Google Corporation's Google News™, etc.
As more and more commerce and information is provided via a given provider's web portal, the ability to provide a gratifying user experience becomes increasingly important. A more effective means of presenting content is through the tailoring of content delivered to a given user to meet the needs, preferences and interests of the given. Personalizing content delivered to users may generally improve user satisfaction. Some web sites support personalization of one or more features of that particular Web site or a portion of that Web site, but typically only on a per-site basis. For example, a given web site may allow a user to explicitly specify certain personalization options with respect to content, layout and graphical elements of the given web site. A given user may select desired types of content, for example, by filling out a questionnaire or checklist that the site stores for retrieval when the user accesses the site.
One example of personalization is the “My Yahoo!™”, section of the Yahoo!™ web portal, which allows a given user to personalize some aspects of his or her interface to Yahoo!™. FIG. 1 shows a screen diagram of the Yahoo!™ home page 100 whereby content is presented in a user without regard for any personalization preferences. FIG. 2 illustrates a screen diagram of the My Yahoo!™ home page 200. My Yahoo!™ allows a given user to develop a “front page” directed to his or her interests. FIG. 3 is a screen diagram illustrating a web page form 300 that allows a given user to personalize the content of his or her front page by explicitly selecting desired content modules from a checklist 302. My Yahoo!™ also allows a user to tailor the layout and the presentation features such as color and background based on his or her personalization preferences, using these personalization preferences to select content for the front page, as well as determine how the selected content is to be displayed.
For active users of such websites, creating or otherwise identifying personalized content is facilitated via interaction with the website. That is, users may actively select desired content in the manner described above. This technique is problematic for a new user, however, because determining what a user finds interesting cannot be resolved by observing and complying with user selected preferences, such as story type and category. Instead, the web site must rely on the user actively stating preferences for content and how to display such content. This presents an issue where the web site is unable to provide personalized content where the user has yet to provide feedback to the system indicating his or her preferences.
One proposed solution is to use existing information about the user to build a profile. One source of existing information is a click history for a given user, which may be used to determine those content items that the user finds interesting. Another source of information is the browse history of the given user. Both these approaches, however, suffer from a common drawback of requiring the user to be an existing subscriber to a publicly accessible Internet portal, such as Yahoo!™.
Accordingly, a need exists for a system and method that facilitates the construction of a user profile in the case where the user does not actively specify his or her preference for content for the purpose of constructing a user profile.